


When You Are Here

by Grinner_H



Series: 15 a Piece Prompt Challenge [15]
Category: Finder no Hyouteki | Finder Series
Genre: M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 04:23:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8357029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grinner_H/pseuds/Grinner_H
Summary: For Prompt #91 - Simplicity (selected by Ash from 200 Writing Challenge).





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CaptainTsukiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainTsukiko/gifts).



> For Prompt #91 - _Simplicity_ (selected by **[Ash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashida)** from **[200 Writing Challenge](http://insane-1.deviantart.com/art/200-Writing-Challenge-68163506)** ).

He stands beneath the fall of rain like he's trying to drown himself in it. 

You observe this - observe _him_ \- from beneath the shelter of a porch roof, within the comfort of a rocking chair. Between your lips, a lit cigarette. Within your chest, the steady _thump-thump-thump_ of your heart; a backbeat to the rhythm of this thunderous storm.

You watch him standing on the lawn, his mud-speckled shoes, the ruined silk of his elaborately embroidered changshan.

You can't believe that you were afraid of him once. 

But that feels like a distant memory now, a faraway time when you understood next to nothing about him.

His hair is soaked through, hangs heavy like a theater curtain against the graceful line of his back. You wonder why he keeps it this way, in memory of a dead father who never thought of him as a son.

Somedays, you find him running his fingers through those silk-smooth strands, twirling their ends around his finger, and you wonder if he finds comfort in the burden of it.

You like to think you understand everything about him now, but it's moments like these that make you feel that you don't get him at all. Moments that make you wonder about the missing pieces of the past he'd only admitted to when he was inebriated enough to be vulnerable. Moments that made you envy the trust and secrets so freely given to another man who could never love him the way you do. 

Trust that you had to work for. Secrets he still keeps. 

Maybe it's his own brand of crazy, not unlike his anachronistic fashion sense, not unlike his penchant for standing unsheltered amid raging thunderstorms.

You don't know how he stands it - his hair and his clothes, the wet, the cold, the sheer fucking _loudness_ of it all, clinging to him like some needy lover, beating upon him as if each raindrop were attempting to carve themselves into his frame.

You don't know how he remains uncaring and unafraid. Of ruining his clothes. Of making himself sick. Of getting struck by lightning. Of drowning standing up.

You hate the rain. 

And you would like to think yourself content, _safer,_ somehow, with your shelter and your cigarettes and your dry, dry skin.

But something about this feels _wrong,_ and you don't have to analyze it to know that it's because he _isn't_ by your side. 

So you stand and crush the cigarette beneath the ball of your bare foot. You leap off the wooden floor - steps be damned, you were never one for convention and _rules_ \- and come to stand beside him, shoulder-width apart. 

Fei Long stares at you, surprise coloring his lilac-tinged eyes. "I thought you hated the rain."

What you hate is all this space that's between you, so you close the distance with your fingers entwining his. "How could I, when _you're_ in it?"

Fei Long smiles. It is loud like thunder.


End file.
